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Gabriel Martínez Vera has received an award from the National Science Foundation Linguistics Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement program (Ling-DDRI) for his project “On the semantics of evidentials.”

We are thrilled to announce that Vicki Carstens will join the faculty of the Department of Linguistics as Professor of Syntax in Fall 2020! She comes to us from Southern Illinois University where she is Professor & Chair of Linguistics.

Prof. Carstens is a renowned generative syntactician who has worked extensively on word order and agreement cross-linguistically. She is a skilled, experienced fieldworker and an expert on African languages with a focus on Bantu.

We are pleased to announce the recipients of our first annual Alumni Research Awards. Through this program the department awards up to $1000 annually to graduate students to support research projects. These awards were made possible through the generous donations of alumni from our Ph.D. program. This year’s awards go to:

We are very sad to relate the news that Sam Epstein died on November 29, 2019 at his home. Epstein was the Marilyn J. Shatz Collegiate Professor of Linguistics and Cognitive Science at the University of Michigan. He obtained his Ph.D. from the Department of Linguistics at the University of Connecticut in 1987, writing a thesis titled, “Empty Categories and Their Antecedents.” Epstein went on to become one of the most influential figures in modern syntactic theory. He produced a number of ground-breaking works which are considered to be classics of the field. This for example holds for his 1999 paper “Un-principled Syntax: The Derivation of Syntactic Relations”. C-command has always been considered to be one of the most fundamental syntactic relations. Until that paper, no one really knew why, which left the whole field in a rather uncomfortable position: there was an ever present relation that fundamentally affected almost all syntactic phenomena and we did not understand why that was the case. In the paper in question, Epstein proposed an amazingly elegant and simple deduction of c-command which also explained why c-command is so pervasive. It was, and still is, an example of syntactic theorizing at its best. That paper and Epstein’s work more generally (e.g., books A Derivational Approach to Syntactic Relations and Derivations in Minimalism) led to a fundamental change in the syntactic theory, with derivationality and derivational mechanisms being emphasized over representational mechanisms. The field simply would not have been the same without Epstein.

Nick Huang is here as a visiting researcher, supported by a two-year fellowship from the National University of Singapore. At UConn, he will be working with Jon Sprouse. Nick received his PhD from the University of Maryland earlier this year. His interests are in cross-linguistic variation and learning, and he has worked on topics such as locality, modality, and linguistic illusions.

Marcin Dadan successfully defended his dissertation “Head Labeling Preference and Language Change” on Friday September 6. He will now take up a position as a visiting lecturer in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Florida. Congratulations, Marcin!

Harry van der Hulst has received the Faculty Excellence in Research and Creativity – Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences Award.

This award is given by the UConn Alumni Foundation Alumni Relations Office in recognition of research excellence and the highest level of creativity to enhance UConn’s academic and creative reputation.